Phillip & Peaches

I wrote this three months ago upon hearing about the death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman:

Early Sunday morning Phillip Seymour Hoffman died with a syringe in his arm and empty packs of heroin nearby. Did he mean to overdose? Was it an accident? Was he aware of the possibility he would die and just didn't care? Was he depressed or was he celebrating? We will probably never know. A coroner will perform an autopsy and make conclusions that the media will dissect and people will chat about over Friday night drinks in between admiring haircuts and chastising hemlines. Just another name pronounced with finality.

Phillip's kids will grow up without a dad, perhaps defending him in the schoolyard because his was not an admirable death. But he did have a celebrated life. To most of us he had it all; an acting career, three beautiful children, and recognition of his talent and hard work. From a young age he also had heroin, and as it so often does, heroin won in the end.

I stopped writing because I didn't have the words to express the profound disappointment at another senseless death. Of course I did not know Phillip but his performances were so fiercely intelligent, truthful and raw that I felt like I knew him. I started to write this as an appeal to educate people about the dangers of drugs and express my concern that drug education is not being used the right way.

Bachelor of 'give a damn'

I have a new subject  to add to the standard Pharmacy degree. It's called 'Defending the Profession' and it is something every budding Pharmacist needs to master.

I am always surprised by the surveys (like this one) that name Pharmacists as one of the most trusted professions. In practice it feels very different, with patients/customers becoming defensive and even aggressive when we ask them basic duty-of-care questions. I gotta tell you, it's pretty tough to deal with when I am just looking out for them. When I reveal to an acquaintance that I have a Pharmacy degree their response is usually along the lines of: "Is that really boring?" and "Do you have to go to uni to be a Pharmacist?" followed closely by "Why do I have to show my license to buy pain-killers?". I guess these aren't the people surveyed. For the record, the answers to those questions are: No, not boring, stressful and busy usually but not boring; Yes, it is a four year degree plus an additional year of supervision and well, I'm going to talk about question 3.

Drugs are not safe... but they can save your life.

I recently participated in a little vaccination debate on Facebook, triggered by some negative press about Gardisil, the 'cervical cancer' vaccine (this is worth reading if you are concerned). It quickly became a discussion about immunisation in general. One of my highly educated and very respected friends highlighted the difficulties he faced when trying to make an informed decision about what was best for his child. It seems that it is such a sensitive issue that people on both sides of the debate can quickly become overly emotional and unable to provide clear, unbiased information. I weighed in and just found myself repeating 'risk vs benefit'. For me this is what all decisions basically boil down to. I feel like this concept is not considered often enough in the prescribing and taking of drugs.

We don't call them drugs though, we call them medicines. Only the scary illegal ones are drugs right? It's all sugar-coating- a medicine is a drug, a lot of the natural things we take are technically drugs. The definition of a drug is: a medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body (Oxford Dictionary). So food is a drug too. I'm going to confine my rant to legal pharmaceutical drugs here though.